In the last twenty years, the use of personal computing devices, such as desktop computer systems, laptop computer systems, handheld computers systems, and tablet computer systems, has grown tremendously. These personal computing devices provide users with a broad range of interactive applications, business utilities, communication abilities, and entertainment possibilities.
Current personal computing devices provide access to these interactive applications via a user interface. Typical computing devices have on-screen graphical interfaces that present information to a user using a display device, such as a monitor or display screen, and receive information from a user using an input device, such as a mouse, a keyboard, a joystick, or a stylus.
Even more so than computing systems, the use of pen and paper is ubiquitous among literate societies. While graphical user interfaces of current computing devices provide for effective interaction with many computing applications, typical on-screen graphical user interfaces have difficulty mimicking the common use of a pen or pencil and paper. For example, desktop and laptop computer systems typically do not have a pen-like interface. Moreover, input into a computer is shown on an electronic display, and is not tangible and accessible like information written on paper or a physical surface.
Finally, images and writings drawn with a pen-like interface on a paper surface have convenience, permanence, and tangibility, but do not allow for easy reuse of the paper surface once it has been utilized with the pen-like interface.